Tony Cliff - Biography

Biography

Although as a young man he identified with Communism, he never joined the Communist Party of Palestine, as he had not met any of its members before becoming a socialist activist. However, he did join the socialist Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair, soon becoming not only a Trotskyist in 1933, but also a confirmed opponent of Zionism. Along with other Hashomer Hatzair members, he joined the illegal Palestine Revolutionary Communist League, necessitating the use of several pseudonyms in three languages.

During World War II, Gluckstein was imprisoned by the British authorities who governed the territory. After his release, he moved to Britain in 1947, but was never able to become a citizen and remained a stateless person. To the end of his life, he spoke English with a distinct foreign accent. He was for a while deported to the Republic of Ireland and was only permitted to take up British residency due to the status of Chanie Rosenberg, his wife, as a British citizen. Living in London, he again became active with the Revolutionary Communist Party onto whose leadership he had been co-opted. For most purposes Gluckstein was a supporter of the leadership of the RCP around Jock Haston, and as such he was involved with the discussions concerning the nature of those states dominated by Russia and the Communist parties initiated by a faction within the RCP. This debate was linked to other discussions on the nationalised industries in Britain and the increasingly critical stance of Haston and the RCP as to the leadership of the Fourth International with regard to Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia in particular.

On the break-up of the RCP, his supporters joined Gerry Healy's group The Club, although, having been deported to Ireland, Gluckstein himself did not. In 1950 he helped launch the Socialist Review Group which was based around a journal of the same name. This was to be the main publication for which Gluckstein wrote during the 1950s, until it was superseded by International Socialism in 1960, eventually ceasing publication altogether in 1962.

By the time he gained permanent residency in Britain, his supporters in The Club had been expelled due to differences on Birmingham Trades Council as to socialist policy concerning the war in Korea, where Gluckstein's co-factionalists refused to take a position of support for either side in the war.

Owing to his lack of established residency rights in Britain and during his earlier exile in Ireland the name Roger or Roger Tennant was used as a pseudonym. The first edition of his short book on Rosa Luxemburg in 1959 was possibly the first use of the pen name 'Tony Cliff'. In the 1960s Cliff would revive many of his earlier pseudonyms in the pages of International Socialism in which journal reviews are to be found by Roger, Roger Tennant, Sakhry, Lee Rock and Tony Cliff, but none by Yigael or Yg'al Gluckstein.

His group was renamed the International Socialists in 1962, and was to grow from less than 100 members in 1960 until it claimed in the region of 3,000 in 1977, at which point it was renamed the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Cliff remained a leading member until his death in 2000. He was central to the various reorientations carried out in the SWP from time to time to react to changes in the situation of the working class. In particular, after the high level of strike activity in the early seventies, he argued in the late seventies that the working class movement was entering a "downturn" and that the party's activity should be radically changed as a result. A fierce debate ensued, which Cliff's side eventually won.

The SWP is now the largest self-styled revolutionary party in Britain, and the leading group in the International Socialist Tendency. Cliff's biography is, as he himself remarked, inseparable from that of the groups of which he was a leading member.

Shortly before his death, he underwent a major surgical operation on his heart.